Founder and Editor of The Lanchester Review. Previous or occasional contributor to Telegraph Blogs, Comment is Free, The First Post/The Week, Harry's Place, New Directions, The Brussels Journal, The London Progressive Journal, Labour Uncut, The American Conservative and Russia Today (RT). Available for work via davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, all lower case.

Friday, 7 December 2012

You Been Misled, You Been Had, You Been Took

Not an exact parallel, I admit.

But as surely as Malcolm X pointed out on the map the huge concentration of Democratic Senators and Congressmen in the South in the 1960s, so you need only look at the concentration of Labour MPs in centres of Muslim population, where they are vulnerable to Respect at least insofar as it could split the vote and let in someone else, or, far more numerously, in centres of Catholic population, where the Constituency Labour Parties tend to be even more Catholic than the electorates, and more than willing to press the deselect button.

Primrose Hill types who assume that Labour is at least sold on the principle of same-sex "marriage" urgently need to get out more. No wonder that, in 13 years, it never legislated for any such thing, with Jack Straw, the MP for Blackburn, explicitly and eloquently ruling it out when he had Ministerial responsibility for these matters.

As we see, it is actually an easier sell to, and by, the Conservative Party. Scores, possibly hundreds, of Labour MPs are desperate for Tory opponents to succeed in portraying it as "the wrong priority", so that it never reaches the floor of the House.

If Straw is now in favour, then that is only because he is retiring. He wouldn't have dared face the Blackburn electorate, in which every other person who is not a Muslim would be a Catholic, or possibly the other way round, after having voted for this.

Much of the PLP is desperate, truly desperate, for enough Tories to make enough of a fuss that they never need to cast a vote on it. Most of them would want to vote in favour, although more than you seem to think would not. But scores of the former know that that would be electoral or reselection suicide on the ground.

Jack Straw was happy to face his Blackburn constitutents having scrapped Married Couples tax allowances, lowered the gay age of consent to 16, legalised contraceptives and abortions for under-16's (behind their parents backs) and legalised de-facto marriage in the Civil partnerships Act.

So it wouldn't have been that much of a leap for him. In fact, gay marriage hardly adds anything to what Labour have already done in 13 years.

Your much-feted leader Mr Miliband will not only whip his Party to support it, he has publicly said he'll introduce it, post-2015, if Cameron doesn't get on with it.

As he will introduce an elected (Party-controlled) Lords too.

Most of the bad things the Tory rebels have managed to block (e.g Lords reform) will be brought in under a Labour administration. Just wait and see.

If you were to speak out against gay marriage at a Labour Party Conference, you'd be booed off stage as a "nasty Tory".

Who mentioned a Labour Party Conference, of all things? Although, for your sake, let's leave aside the idea that people are screamed down as Tories for supporting the former Governments' record rather than the present Government's half-baked musings. Based on the rest of your comment, perhaps they are.

scrapped Married Couples tax allowances

Done by the Tories. Every Labour MP voted against it. They never brought it back. But they didn't get rid of it.

lowered the gay age of consent to 16

Free vote; would have gone through regardless of party composition of the House.

legalised contraceptives and abortions for under-16's (behind their parents backs)

Done by Thatcher. A good 10 years old, more like 15, by the time that Labour returned to office.

legalised de-facto marriage in the Civil partnerships Act

It is not "de facto marriage" at all, as everyone concerned made very clear at the time. Blair would never have enacted that, and there would have been 100 Labour votes against it such a thing had been proposed.

Your much-feted leader Mr Miliband will not only whip his Party to support it

No, he won't. And he is not my Leader. I am an Independent.

he has publicly said he'll introduce it, post-2015

He has said no such thing. Don't just make things up, dear boy. He'd allow a free vote if anyone brought in a Private Member's Bill, and then just let it die, as such Bills almost always do. Don't make things up and assume that I don't know any better.

As he will introduce an elected (Party-controlled) Lords too

Bitterly opposed by almost the entire Parliamentary Labour Party (the present House of Lords is also "party-controlled", by the way), especially after the 2015 round of retirements. You haven't the first clue what you are talking about. But then, you also thought that it had been Labour that had abolished the Married Couple's Tax Allowance and put underage girls on the Pill.

This time, socially conservative Britain, which is largely concentrated in Labour areas, has been pushed too far. Miliband himself is in favour of this thing; not, I expect, that he has ever really thought about it very much. Most of his MPs are. But neither he nor they have the political death wish necessary to push it.

You people's long, long tyranny, not least in the 1980s, has finally met an obstacle.

As Thatcher said about the abolition of the married couples' allowance under Major, "They (the electorate) are saying to us, let's get the message, you've not been conservative enough!" She probably intended a capital C, though. No wonder they voted Labour in 97. Shame Labour didn't do what it had in no small measure been elected to do and bring back the allowance.

One for 2015, perhaps? The near-nonagenarian Maggie to appear in a Labour PPB, even? Tebbit has already come close to declaring for Labour over Europe - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100177461/what-will-happen-if-tories-lend-their-votes-to-ukip-and-labour-rediscovers-patriotism/

Yes, I remember that interview with Maggie. She really laid in to Major over the abolition of the married allowance and other things, Masstricht and so on. Very interesting Tebbit link, like P. Hitchens saying he would back any party that promised to renationalise the railways in 2015. I think we all know what that means.

Miliband is already winning wards where Blair never even put up candidates.

When it came to press endorsements, all Blair could manage were The Sun, which most Labour supporters never knew had declared for New Labour (New Labour might not have lasted so long if they had realised), and The Times, which most of its own readers never knew had declared for New Labour; they would just have switched to the Daily Telegraph if they had ever had any inkling.

Whereas Miliband, if he played it right, could bypass the Murdoch papers altogether on the basis that only he and the party led by him now stood for the Union as a first principle, and any concept of English identity.

A universal postal service bound up with the monarchy. The Queen’s Highways, rather than toll roads owned by faraway and unstable petrostates. Her Majesty’s Constabulary, rather than the British KGB that is the impending “National Crime Agency”.

Labour’s own 1997 manifesto commitment to renationalise the railways. The National Health Service, rather than piecemeal privatised provision. Keeping Sunday at least as special as the last Conservative Government left it, which admittedly is not saying very much.

The restoration both of energy independence and of the economic basis of paternal authority, through the reopening of the mines promised by Ed Miliband to one hundred thousand people at the 2012 Durham Miners’ Gala, as well as through the expansion of nuclear power, which, like economic recovery, was proceeding apace until the last General Election result wrecked it.

The historic regimental system. Aircraft carriers with aircraft on them. No Falkland Islands oil to Argentina. The State action necessary in order to maintain the work of charities and of churches. The State action necessary in order to maintain a large and thriving middle class.

A referendum on continued membership of the EU. A real terms reduction in the British financial contribution to it. A free vote on the redefinition of legal marriage.

About Me

Founder, Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of The Lanchester Review since 2013. Founder, Proprietor (for now), Publisher (for now) and Editor-in-Chief of Lanchester Books since 2014. Charity volunteer and administrator since 1994. Freelance journalist since 1996. Supply teacher and market research worker from 2002 until prevented by disability. Member of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham since 2006. Preventing the University of Durham’s undergraduates’ degrees from getting the way of their education since 2000.
Elected Parish Councillor from the age of 21 until I stood down voluntarily in 2013. During that time, Lanchester was among the first in the country to secure power of wellbeing, power of general competence, and Quality Parish Council Status.
At 21, I began eight years as a governor of a primary school which, at the time of my appointment, still had the same Headteacher as when I had been a pupil there. Three weeks short of 22, I found myself in the same position when I began eight years as a governor of a comprehensive school.
Since May 2013, a member of the Durham’s Police and Crime Commissioner's Community Panel.